Book 3
11
but even the smells they enjoy are those that have agreeable associations, and are not intrinsically agreeable. By smells not intrinsically agreeable I mean those that we enjoy because of either anticipation or recollection, for example the smell of things to eat or drink, for we enjoy these scents on account of a different pleasure, that of eating or drinking; by intrinsically agreeable I mean scents such as those of flowers (this is the reason of Stratonicus’sA contemporary musician, a number of whose smart sayings are recorded by Athenaeus 8.347f-352d. neat remark that the scent of flowers is beautiful but that of things to eat and drink sweet).
12
For even the pleasures of taste are not all attractive to animals, nor are those perceived with the tip of the tongue, but those perceived by the throat, the sensation of which seems more like touch than taste; so that gourmands do not pray that they may have a long tongue but a crane’s gullet, like Philoxenus son of Eryxis.Mr. Hospitable, son of Mistress Belch—presumably a character in comedy.
13
It follows that broadly speaking profligacy must be considered to be related to the objects of touch, and likewise it is with pleasures of that sort that the profligate is concerned;for tippling and gluttony and lechery and gormandizing and the like all have to do with the sensations specified, and these are the departments into which profligacy is divided.
14
But nobody is called profligate if he exceeds in regard to the pleasures of sight or hearing or smell; those errors we criticize without severe rebuke, and generally all the things included under the term lack of self-control : the uncontrolled are not profligate, yet they are not temperate.
15
Therefore the person of such a character as to be deficient in all the enjoyments which practically everybody must share and must enjoy, is insensitive (or whatever the proper term is), and he that exceeds in them is profligate.
